Why don’t cockatoos have war songs?

We suggest the accounts offered by the target articles could be strengthened by acknowledging the role of group selection and cultural niche construction in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of human music. We argue that group level traits and highly variable cultural niches can explain the diversity of human song, but the target articles’ accounts are insufficient to explain such diversity.

Cultural positioning and strategic resilience

The international corridor located on the US-Mexico border is recognized as a highly resilient community existing within the fast-emerging economy. This community comprises a cultural integration of American and Latinx cultures, which is evident within business and consumer practices. Accordingly, business and branding strategy is culturally oriented and culturally expressive. This paper presents two business cases that illustrate how cultural positioning is achieved with local brands that expand beyond the local context to the mainstream market. The two cases presented in this paper are Topo Chico and Laredo Taco. Each of these cases began within a cultural niche with recognized potential that translated to the mainstream American market, demonstrating strategic resilience along the way. The Topo Chico case shows perseverance in a bottle and the Laredo Taco case shows resilience combined as authenticity and innovation. The implications of the cases presented to demonstrate the value of a strong cultural positioning, strategic alliances, and a view to the longer term and farther horizon.

Labin ili izvedba undergrounda kao jedan od modusa otpora izolaciji/periferiji

Using the example of the town of Labin in Istria, I demonstrate how isolation, the so-called periphery, can also serve as an expression of resistance in a cultural niche. The collective Labin Art Express (L.A.E., initiated by Dean Zahtila, late Krešimir Farkaš, Graziano Kršić) is the initiator of the fundamental L.A.E. project Underground City XXI ‒ independent underground Labin cultural city as an alternative to the existing above-ground, heteronomous Labin, i.e. the creation of a real city 150 m below the earth’s surface ‒ in underground halls and tunnels, carved in solid rock, connecting Labin, Raša, Plomin and Rabac, with streets, bars, galleries, swimming pools, playgrounds for children, shops, restaurants, the Museum of Mining and Industry of Istria. Thereby we can compare Labin in terms of urbanity and anthropology with the town of Katowice, which in 2018 was selected to host the most significant UN Climate Change Conference, following the 2015 Paris Agreement. Katowice were chosen as one of Europe’s most polluted sites due to the exploitation of coal i.e. the transition of the aforementioned town from a mining and industrial site to a modern industrial, economical, technological and cultural centre.

Cultural attributes of Russian rock: elitist or mass culture?

The article deals with identifying Russian rock culture as elitist or mass culture. The author characterizes the concepts of elitist and mass culture, explaining the difference between them, and examines the characteristics of Russian rock culture on the basis of this analysis. The author concludes that Russian rock culture is a kind of reconciliation of elite and mass culture: in the second half of the XX century the complexity of the Soviet political system and ideology determined the destiny and cultural attributes of Russian rock, making it a complex, multifaceted and eclectic phenomenon. Forced to survive, rock bands had to incorporate elements of popular music into their works and use mass media to attract the public. Having joined the ranks of commercial performances, rock 'n' roll gained more popularity, and gradually there appeared some signs of the rock culture decline. In the end, however, rock culture did not transform into mass culture, and Russian rock musicians and rock poets continued to play their music in search of a new cultural niche for themselves to express their critical attitude to reality, their denial and opposition to the processes of industrialization and urbanization, returning to the history and culture of the nation, paying attention to philosophical and religious issues and to the depth and completeness of poetic content, reconstructing Russian cultural memory, reflecting on the environmental situation in the modern world. Rock culture is still a culture of resistance, but as society continues to change, the form and content of resistance is also constantly changing, and it is because of this that rock culture has acquired a kind of humanistic foundation that is much deeper than that of popular culture, so ignoring the difference between rock culture and popular culture destroys the innate spirit and the essence of rock culture itself.

Why don't cockatoos have war songs?

We suggest that the accounts offered by the target articles could be strengthened by acknowledging the role of group selection and cultural niche construction in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of human music. We argue that group level traits and highly variable cultural niches can explain the diversity of human song, but the target articles' accounts are insufficient to explain such diversity.

Gender fluidity as affordance negotiation

Gender is often viewed as static binary state for people to embody, based on the sex they were assigned at birth. However, cultural studies increasingly understand gender as neither binary nor static, a view supported both in psychology and sociology. On this view, gender is negotiated between individuals, and highly dependent on context. Specifically, individuals are thought to be offered culturally gendered social scripts that allow them and their interlocutors the ability to predict future actions, and to understand the scene being set, establishing roles and expectations. We propose to understand scripts in the framework of enactive-ecological predictivism, which integrates aspects of ecological enactivism, notably the importance of dynamical sensorimotor interaction with an environment conceived as a field of affordances, and predictive processing, which views the brain as a predictive engine that builds its probabilistic models in an effort to reduce prediction error. Under this view, script-based negotiation can be linked to the enactive neuroscience concept of a cultural niche, as a landscape of cultural affordances. Affordances are possibilities for action that constrain what actions are pre-reflectively felt possible based on biological, experiential and cultural multisensorial cues. With the shifting landscapes of cultural affordances brought about by a number of recent social, technological and epistemic developments, the gender scripts offered to individuals are less culturally rigid, which translates in an increase in the variety of affordance fields each individual can negotiate. This entails that any individual has an increased possibility for gender fluidity, as shown by the increasing number of people currently identifying outside the binary.

Crítica ou conversa? Youtubers e a crítica cinematográfica contemporânea.

The sprouting of the cinema is a recent historical episode (little more than a century) and it became an entertainment mass phenomenon that impacted our culture and society. In the beginning, since movies became product, quickly texts on this subject were included on magazines, although in a not profound way, with accented informative function. Writers (critics) used to report/tell the events/stories and made indications to the spectators, but without focusing on artistic appreciation. When movies became more consistent cultural industry art, entertainment and product, the critical became an important link point between production and spectators. Since then other styles of text had been developed: analytical, opinative, ideological, advertising, etc. The “Cahiers du Cinema” magazine (France, 1951- now) was one of main landmarks for cinematographic critical, as a new glance, according to the expressions of the society and the technologies of the time. Currently, even so the language of the cinema (matrix of the audiovisual) is expanded (diverse screens and products) until nowadays, movies continue to be one of the forceful forms to tell histories (mass and cultural niche spectators) and the critic continues to be one of the links (films and spectator). In digital culture time we are accomplices of the sprouting of other vectors for movie critical. Lovers movies started in their own Youtube Channels to criticizes films according to their expressions, to the contemporary technologies and to the society surround him/her. In that way, the canonical format by the traditional press is put in check.

The phenomenon of SoNoR ensemble in the context of the cultural paradigm shift at the turn of the 21st century

Towards the end of the millennium, a once-vast empire had collapsed, causing a multitude of disruptions. This was an empire that had won World War II and become one of the world's superpowers for many decades; the empire that had created a completely new ideology and culture that had spread throughout many of its constituent nations as well as a number of neighboring countries. Music had been an important part of this culture. The demise of such a vast empire resulted, on one hand, in many of its component nations gaining liberty, but on the other, in various military, economic, and legal problems, among which should be mentioned a cultural and ideological vacuum. At the end of the last century, Azerbaijan, as well as other post-Soviet countries, was going through a period of crisis and culture shock, during which all governmental culture programs had been shut down. SoNoR, a contemporary music ensemble, appeared as an alternative to those programs during the darkest period of chaos. It was founded solely by a group of enthusiasts, and filled a cultural niche, becoming an image of contemporary music in the country for many years. SoNoR arranged concerts, festivals, workshops, and premieres both nationally and internationally. The band also established cultural exchanges with various countries. This article concerns the phenomenon of this group in the context of the turn of the century, as well as an attempt to analyze the main reasons for its ups and downs and eventual breakup.